Scott Woodward:
The historical record shows that Joseph Smith did not implement or endorse any practices or policies which specifically prevented church members with black African ancestry from fully participating in priesthood offices or temple worship. But in 1847, only three years after Joseph’s death, attitudes and teachings of some church leaders began to shift away from full inclusion of blacks to partial exclusion until, only five years later, in 1852, President Brigham Young first publicly articulated a priesthood restriction on blacks in the church. In today’s episode of Church History Matters, we probe what exists in the historical record to learn what happened between 1847 and 1852 to precipitate this divergence in attitudes and teachings about blacks away from Joseph Smith’s more inclusive teachings and practices. We’ll then look at the context and content of Brigham Young’s first public articulation of the priesthood restriction and attempt to answer one very important question. Was Brigham Young inspired by God to institute the priesthood ban, or is this an example of an uninspired error? I’m Scott Woodward, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths, and today we dive into our third episode in this series dealing with race and priesthood. Now, let’s get into it.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
All right. Hi, Scott.

Scott Woodward:
Hello, Casey.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Scott, we’ve plowed some ground. This is a really complicated subject, but could you help everybody catch up on where we’re at?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. We’ve been talking a lot about 19th-century views on race in America. It was messy, but in our last episode particularly, we explored two important questions: the first one was, “What was Joseph Smith’s position regarding Black Africans?” And what we found from the historical record was basically this: Joseph believed that blacks were equal with whites in the eyes of God and that they had souls, that they were capable of salvation, which was somewhat contrary to some of the beliefs of the day, and that given equal privileges and opportunities, Joseph believed that blacks could rise just as high as whites. However, he never endorsed interracial marriage between blacks and whites, but he felt that they could and should be equal with whites—

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
—but that there should be strict laws that should be implemented to keep blacks and whites from intermarrying, and that’s pretty par for the course for America at that time. There were some that disagreed with that and thought there should be full integration, but that, again, was a very radical position in the 19th century.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Joseph’s public views on blacks and slavery were not static. We noted that in 1836, Joseph defended the slaveholding rights of southern church members, right? This was against the accusations of radical abolitionism and calls from northern church members to disfellowship southern slaveholding members, and Joseph was trying to navigate that tension, and so that’s when he made that statement, 1836. But then, eight years later, in his 1844 presidential campaign, we see Joseph advocating for the full emancipation of all slaves in this country and for granting them civil rights. So that’s where his position was when he died.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And then our second question that was related to this was, “What policies, if any, did the church have regarding blacks during Joseph Smith’s tenure as church president? We’re going to find as the history moves on, this is actually going to become a very important question, and so we wanted to be really clear up front. Our conclusion, after reviewing all the relevant historical evidence, was that there was no church policy excluding or limiting black participation in any way, whether that was priesthood participation or temple worship. We cannot find any sort of racial, exclusive church policies. Nothing.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Church policy during Joseph Smith’s tenure could be summarized as basically just full inclusion and full participation in the church for blacks.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. And we’ve done a lot of work to explain what the atmosphere was.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And all this, where it’s created the environment Joseph Smith lived in, but it’s actually uplifting to see by the standards of the day the church was really progressive under Joseph Smith when it came to race. They were inclusive, and that’s something that you can feel good about in this whole discussion, was that in Joseph Smith’s time, there wasn’t a policy, as far as we can see.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. And among our evidences for concluding that was, we found at least two ordinations of black men to the priesthood. We’ve got Elijah Ables in 1836. We’ve got Q. Walker Lewis in 1842. We also read an 1840 First Presidency letter explicitly expressing that people of “every color would be invited to come and worship God together in the Nauvoo Temple once it was built. So, yeah, there’s no contemporary evidence of any restrictions whatsoever. And yeah, you almost hold your breath studying this history, right? You’re like, “I hope—I hope this comes out OK.” And it actually does come out quite well in Joseph Smith’s day. In fact, you mentioned that we were perceived as quite progressive. That got us in a lot of trouble in Missouri, right? That was one of the chief reasons that got us kicked out of Missouri, because of the church’s stance toward blacks.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Missouri was a slave state at the time, and it led to problems, which did create some institutional memory for the church. And church leaders are going to be more guarded, moving forward, with how they publicly expressed their stances on blacks. So that’s the review of what we talked about last time.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Let me add one thing. It’s very interesting to go back and reread a lot of this history that I’ve been going over for years with this lens of race relations.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
When you look at the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, with that kind of overlay, a lot of stuff starts to click and make sense. Even Joseph Smith’s presidential campaign in 1844 just swims in this river of race relations and structural, ingrained racism that existed at the time, and it’s difficult for us in the 21st century—I mean, we still have issues, big issues, that we’re dealing with, but it’s hard for us to appreciate just how ingrained this was in everyday life back then.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And how the saints are navigating those waters on their own. And sometimes they make great decisions, and sometimes they make not-so-great decisions, and we’re dealing with the fallout of that, but we have to start at a place where we at least make an attempt to see what their world was like.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And not judge them necessarily by our standards. This is a complicated issue that affects just about everybody in the United States during this time. And boy, if you go outside the United States, it’s an issue all around the world that mankind in general has grappled with over time.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. And sometimes we’re proud of the decisions they make, looking from our vantage point, and sometimes we’re not, and that’s OK. But we’re just trying to understand what happened at that time and why they may have made the decisions that they made.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. And we’re trying to do better, right?

Scott Woodward:
That’s right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And draw closer to Christ. That’s the whole aim of this discussion.

Scott Woodward:
And that leads into today’s topic. Our burning question of today’s episode is, “OK, so what happens next?” we know that there was, eventually, a racially exclusive policy in the church, which was overturned by a 1978 revelation to President Kimball. So if Joseph Smith never instituted any sort of racial priesthood or temple ban, how did that ban get put into place? That’s what we want to talk about today.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. And one disclaimer before we get into the discussion, we use the word “policy” today maybe differently than they would’ve in the 19th century. Mass media and the internet has made it so that when the church changes a policy, they do so very directly and very carefully. They issue a major letter that basically puts it out there, and then they put it in a handbook where you can look up the exact language.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I want to emphasize it wasn’t that way in the 19th century.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
It wasn’t nearly as cut and dry. The first equivalent to what we would call a church handbook doesn’t really appear until 1877. And even then, it’s more of a letter than a handbook.

Scott Woodward:
Mm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
A lot of things that happened in the church happened intuitively—

Scott Woodward:
Mm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—weren’t filtered through the larger group of general authorities that were used to making decisions today, and came about less cleanly than they would’ve today.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And so my question, after reviewing a lot of the data from the 19th century, was, “Was there a policy to begin with?”

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
It’s difficult to make that case.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But there was this prevailing belief, “Oh, didn’t President Young teach this, so we should do this?”—

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—that they don’t really actually sit down and codify until the early 20th century. And so the first 50 years of the so-called policy are nebulous, and it’s clear that it’s not evenly applied, and we’ll see a couple examples of that today as we go through.

Scott Woodward:
That’s very good. In fact, yeah. I want to ask you a question. Let me tee you up a little bit on this. If someone was to ask, “If Joseph Smith didn’t start it, then how did it begin?” And a lot of us who’ve studied this material would like to highlight 1852.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
The quick answer is that the groundwork for a priesthood temple restriction was laid in 1852 during the presidency of Brigham Young. We’re going to go over the details of that in a minute, but it’s also important to know that it wasn’t actually implemented suddenly or all at once.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
It’s going to take over half a century before it solidifies into something resembling church policy that restricts priesthood and temple participation for black Africans. And so I want you to talk a little bit about after the turn of the century, just for a sec. We’re going to come back to 1852 in just a minute, but shortly after the turn of the century in the aftermath of the Reed Smoot hearings, you and I were talking about this once, and you pointed this out—

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
—and it was super insightful to me, that church leaders began to feel that it was wise to begin creating clear policies regarding various challenging issues.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So policymaking wasn’t really much of a priority prior to the Reed Smoot trials.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Can you talk more about that?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. Joseph F. Smith really felt like his role was to codify what the church teaches and believes. And I think a big motivating factor was this guy named Reed Smoot, who’s an apostle to the church, gets elected to the U. S. Senate, and it causes—to say it was a media circus is really understating it. There’s currently no bigger collection in the National Archives than the papers surrounding the Reed Smoot hearings—

Scott Woodward:
Holy cow.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—which took place over several years and was effectively a harsh examination of the church.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So the church was put on the national stage, and everything was brought forward, and it feels like in the aftermath of that Joseph F. Smith felt, “Hey, we need to actually clarify and put out clear statements of policy.” So it’s not just race and the priesthood. They publish a statement on the origin of man, the Church’s position on evolution and a few other things. They recruit James E. Talmage to write Jesus the Christ, to clarify, “Hey, this is what Latter-day Saints believe about Jesus Christ.” They recruit Elder Talmage, and a friend of mine, Brian Ricks, has done some great work on this, to write a statement on the Father and the Son. We didn’t have a clear position on where the scriptures were referring to God and where they were referring to Jesus Christ.

Scott Woodward:
Mm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And part of this, too, was that President Smith sat down and tried to clarify, “What’s the policy when it comes to race?”

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
It’s unfortunate that the policy was set in place at a time when segregation in the United States was at its peak. We’re post-reconstruction, post-civil war.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So to say that there’s a policy before Joseph F. Smith is really a little bit more specific than maybe we should be. The way we think of church policy today, which is very cut and dried, “Hey, what does it say in the handbook,” is not how the church operated in the 19th century.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And like we said, we want to make everything clear and say, “Hey, in 1852, this happened. That’s when the policy was announced.” But it wasn’t a policy in the sense we’d call it a policy today. And it does take over a half century for different developments to happen.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And if it was a policy, then there’s no consistent application of it.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Because there’s tons of exceptions to it throughout the 19th century, and it doesn’t seem like until the 20th century they say, “OK, this is what we’re going to do.”

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And then it stays in place until President Kimball’s revelation.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. That’s so helpful. So helpful. So when we talk about 1852, we’re going to talk about the beginning of the groundwork being laid for what eventually becomes a restrictive policy toward black Africans in the church.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
OK. So let me try to lay out a simple thought framework for a minute that can help us process what we’re about to discuss.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
I want to say it like this. When you study church history carefully, what you’ll find is that this history is a mixture of the human and the divine together. You’re going to find both, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And they’re not always equal parts human and divine, either. Like, in the first decade of the establishment of the church, for example, there was a particularly generous outpouring of the divine, with new scripture and angelically restored keys and revelations and power and gifts of the spirit in abundance, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
These are all well-documented and quite foundational to the project of the Restoration, and sometimes we want to expect this to continue in an unbroken outpouring, but that’s not the reality. What you find instead are what I call “human lulls,” these periods where church leaders are essentially just left to figure out how to lead with the keys conferred on them. And both they and the saints are sort of left to learn how to live out the truths that have already been revealed. And sometimes they do a great job at this, and other times they don’t. And the Lord seems to be totally OK with that kind of wrestle and learning.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And we see these kinds of human lulls in scripture as well. Like, sometimes decades and even centuries go by in scripture without much by way of any obvious divine intervention. So I’m convinced that the Lord is often OK to just let church leaders and members figure things out and make mistakes along the way as they do so. I mean, he even allows errors that have real-life costs attached to them, like letting Joseph Smith lose the book of Lehi and letting the Kirtland Bank fail.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And behind it all, we see a Lord who’s very patient and merciful with his prophets and his people, since, among other reasons, he knows there is no human error that can thwart his divine purposes, right? He will ultimately guide things to ensure that they eventually work out all right in the end. So this is just the general framework to keep in mind as we study church history, and this history we’re dealing with here, especially. Expect to find a mixture of both the human and the divine with, in this case, perhaps more parts human than divine as church leaders and members wade through and are influenced by the muck and mess that is the racial swamp of the 19th and 20th centuries in the U. S.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And let me just say one more thing, too.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Nobody is surprised in the church when we say we believe that our leaders can make mistakes, right? But this history we’re about to discuss will put that belief to the test.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Like, do we really believe the Lord in D&C 1, when he says that he calls weak and simple and error-prone and sinful servants to do his work?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Well, we shall see. Because I can promise there will be times when we will not be impressed with some of the decisions that they make or the stances that they take on this issue.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And we might find ourselves frustrated with how long it takes the Lord to intervene, to correct errors that are going to come from that human element in our leaders, over a century in this case.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But just remember that the Lord’s default approach is to let such things play out and ultimately come to resolution over time with valuable lessons for us to hopefully learn from it all.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
OK. That’s my soapbox.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. And I would emphasize—you said church history is messy.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I’m going to add, all history is messy. When we were going through these materials, we were studying the Old Testament and Come, Follow Me. And, boy, the Old Testament’s messy.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Who—you take an example like Rebekah and Isaac, where I’ve got to look at that and say, “We don’t have the whole record here, because you don’t choose a priesthood heir based on the fact that you like venison.” And then if your wife tricks you into accidentally ordaining the other person, that doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that would stick, but in that case, Isaac was in error, and Rebekah was clearheaded enough to make the correction.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
When you look at scripture really closely, Isaac and Rebekah, Abraham, Moses, Peter, and Paul can’t agree on things, and get into fights with each other, according to the record. And so we’ve got to basically also say, “Let’s have charity for these people.”

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
If we really teach that there is no such thing as prophetic infallibility, an event like the one we’re talking about today puts that to the test. Do we actually believe that?

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And are we willing to grapple with what it means? And God gently guides us along the path to where we go. Like you said, sometimes it doesn’t happen in the timeframe we want it to, but their humanity is there to show us the greatness of God in contrast between the two. And sometimes God has to work with imperfect people who grow up in bad environments, or are sometimes raised with bad values, and gently lead them to where they need to be. So when it comes to race and the priesthood, the analogy I would say here is the Israelites, who took 40 years to get to the point to where they were ready to go into the promised land, the members of the church grew up in such a racially divided society, that it took even longer for them to gradually emerge from the structures that they were raised within.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, that’s tremendous. Remember the day that President Nelson was called to be prophet? And he had the news conference, and someone was asking him questions. I can’t remember about what, but I remember his answer. It was something about church history and errors in the past, something like that. And he said, super meekly and humbly and gently and sweetly, he said, “Give your leaders a little leeway to make mistakes, as you hope that your leaders will give you a little leeway to profit by your errors.” That was great. Just a nice, sweet, like, “Hey, let’s be merciful and kind to these people, and let’s learn from their errors. Let’s learn from their errors.”

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
OK. Should we get into it?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Let’s get into it, yeah.

Scott Woodward:
OK. So let’s bridge the gap. We mentioned 1852 as a watershed moment. What happens between 1844, when Joseph Smith dies, and 1852? If 1852 is the year that there begins to be something of a development of the priesthood-temple restriction, let’s talk about what happens in those intervening years. And maybe I could start it like this, and then jump in wherever you’d like here, Casey, but there were those in leadership positions in Joseph Smith’s day who held differing views from him about black inferiority.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
But because of their loyalty and deference to him, they went along with his inclusive, non-discriminatory approach, and they did not push back. But we see in the historical record that after Joseph Smith’s death, the influence of his posture and “policy,” I’m going to use that, air quotes, of racial inclusion, begins to erode.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Attitudes and doctrinal ideas that favor the narrative of black inferiority, which was so dominant in the United States already outside the church, those feelings that had been repressed before in Joseph Smith’s day, they slowly start to gain dominance in the minds of church leaders and members. Ideas such as that the black African race housed spirits who were less valiant in the premortal existence.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
One year after Joseph Smith’s death, Orson Hyde expresses that, that blacks were the descendants of Cain and Ham, and thus they belonged to a cursed lineage, which was banned from priesthood privileges. That’s going to make inroads not too many years after Joseph’s death. And these are both ideas that have been explicitly and forcefully disavowed in the church’s Gospel Topics essays on race and priesthood in our day, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But that’s when they start cropping up. It’s just after Joseph Smith’s death, and then in the intervening years between 1844 and 1852. What do you want to say about that?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, and it’s not as lockstep as we sometimes assume it is. One interesting thing that happened was in 2015, the church published the Council of Fifty minutes, and Council of Fifty is a political body, so they discussed political issues, and there’s no more hot-button political issue in the time than the status of black people.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
There’s an example in the Council of Fifty minutes where Orson Hyde brings up this theory of, “Hey, maybe black people are in the state that they’re in because of something that happened in premortality. And interestingly, Brigham Young shoots him down there, and then even after he’s elucidated his views on race in 1869, shoots Orson Hyde down twice, saying, “No, there’s nothing to do with premortality.” He cites section 93 of the Doctrine and Covenants, which says all people are born innocent here on Earth. And so to say that there’s one specific, “Hey, this is what we believe and why we are doing this during this time” is really not accurate to say.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And evidence from this time is fragmentary. It’s impossible for us to get inside everybody’s head and say, “How did your view shift or change?”

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But the Council of Fifty minutes, which—Joseph Smith leads the Council of Fifty from a few months before his death, and then Brigham Young takes over—do reveal that at least starting out, they believed in the equality of the races, and there was no set doctrine or teaching on why at that particular time, black people were in slavery and European people tended to dominate.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. And yet, over time, the broader Christian narrative about Cain and Ham really does make inroads into the church, which is interesting.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Becomes the dominant narrative. You wouldn’t say “official doctrine,“ because not everyone agrees with that. Orson Pratt, for instance, pushes back really harshly against that idea. He says, “Prove it.” Like, “How do you know that? That’s not scriptural, and we don’t know that.” And yet both he and Orson Hyde would say it’s got to have something to do with premortality. But then Brigham Young would say it has nothing to do with premortality.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
There is not agreement. There is not unity. But everyone’s trying to figure out—see, the assumption they were working from is there seems to be some inferiority with blacks to whites. Which, limited education, limited opportunities, right? Joseph Smith said make those all equal, and blacks are going to be equal with whites. But in that time, with less education, less opportunity, it did seem to a lot of people like that was a true statement, which would happen to any race if they were put down that way.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
So there is disagreement, and there’s people trying to figure it out doctrinally, but it’s all based on that assumption that there is some inherent inferiority.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
There’s another thing, too, that I want to point out, which is that as the Saints move out of the United States, right, as they leave Nauvoo out of the more hostile environment there that they were experiencing in Nauvoo particularly and in the U. S. more generally, after Joseph Smith’s martyrdom, and they were able to move out to the seclusion and relative safety of the Utah territory, this is going to lower their collective racial restraint, if we can say it like that.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Meaning that in Utah, church members and leaders are going to feel more free and unrestrained to express their views about blacks and to crystallize their own racial hierarchy. It’s a challenging phrase even to say out loud, “racial hierarchy,” but that does happen. It is established in Utah. As LDS historian Russell Stevenson put it, he says that being aggressively targeted and attacked as a people in the U. S. “seemed to solidify the Mormons’ racial identity. The time for racial experimentation was over, however long-suffering the Saints felt Joseph Smith to be toward the black community, they had no more patience for such things. Now, seeing Nauvoo, Illinois, even America, as a tinder box set to explode in the light of a looming millennial day, the Saints closed ranks. The act of moving to Utah created the space for the solidification of a white Mormon identity.” What a statement. So Utah territory was seen by many Saints as, like, a racial sanctuary for whites, where the white race would dominate and flourish. And while the few blacks who do live in Utah would do so as inferiors, submissively waiting for the Lord to remove the “curse from their skins,” we have statements like that from W. W. Phelps, Eliza R. Snow has a poem, George Q. Cannon says some things—like, in 1852, here’s Eliza R. Snow. She says, “The curse of the Almighty rests upon the colored race. In his own time, by his own means, that curse will be removed.” So there is a curse one day that’ll be removed.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
W. W. Phelps in 1851 in Utah, for instance, I just want to drop some of these statements. You can see the thinking of the saints at the time. He says that Utah was the land where “the Jehovah-smitten Canaanite would bow in humble submission to his superiors and prepare himself for a mansion of glory when the black curse of disobedience shall have been chased from his skin by a glance from the Lord.” Geez. That’s uncomfortable to read.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But you see this idea that one day the blacks will be equal, but it is not this day, and Utah’s going to be the place where they will “bow in humble submission to [their] superiors.” George Q. Cannon, decades later, one of the church leaders there, he said, “The purity of the Caucasian race is more likely to be preserved in our territory than in many other portions of the United States.” This was the idea that Utah could be this racial sanctuary where we no longer have to experiment, like Joseph Smith was, with racial equality, and a lot of people in the church felt relieved by that.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
So that’s in the background. That’s going to play out in the context in which Brigham Young is going to feel very comfortable saying certain things that we need to get into now in 1852. I don’t know. What else do you want to say about that before we talk 1852?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
While we’re talking about Utah being separate from the rest of the country, too, let’s try and center this in the larger American context—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—where it wasn’t uncommon in the 19th century for a politician, even a politician as progressive as someone like Abraham Lincoln, to talk about the solution to the race problem to be to separate the races, not to integrate the races, right?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
A really progressive person in the 1840s or 1850s was someone that was saying, “Hey, we should move all black people back to Africa.”

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
“There’s no way that the two races are going to be able to intermingle, and they shouldn’t intermingle.” And I’ve gone across sites where statements made by Abraham Lincoln are termed to be racist, and by today’s standards, they sound racist, but the goal during this time wasn’t necessarily to integrate the races, it was to keep the races “pure.” And a lot of people felt like the best way to do that was to separate them.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Like we mentioned, almost every state in the United States had a law on the books against interracial marriage, and this goes on until the 1960s. And in the early 20th century, it wasn’t considered weird for Teddy Roosevelt to give a speech where he says, “We must safeguard the purity of the Teutonic race.”

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
If somebody’s talking about a pure Germanic race today, that sets off all kinds of alarm bells in our heads.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Because we’ve realized, “Hey, these are our fellow human beings.” But the prevailing thought of not just the saints but everybody in the 19th century, was that the races should not intermingle, that if you were a really progressive person you were basically saying they should be separate but equal, and there was only a tiny minority that felt like they could racially mix with each other. And so the saints, I’m sad to say, aren’t outside the mainstream in saying some of these things.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And while putting them in Utah gave them spectator status to the ongoing racial strife that was happening in the rest of the United States, they’re not outside the norm, I guess you’d say, among white Europeans in the 19th century, to elucidate some of these views. So it’s difficult for us, because this is repugnant to us in the 21st century.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But if you travel back in time, we might be really surprised at the extent that they would say things that today set off alarm bells, like, “We have to preserve the white race,” or, “We have to maintain our racial purity,” which we’ve seen the roads that can lead down and how dangerous it is, but it’s not till the mid 20th century when we start to, as a society, learn those lessons.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. That’s tremendous context. Thanks, Casey. So we need to talk about Winter Quarters for just a second.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
So on the journey from Nauvoo to Utah, we’re in Winter Quarters, Nebraska, which at that time was just not the United States. That’s just out West. This is Indian territory.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. It’s beyond the frontier, yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. And we set up a place called Winter Quarters, where we prepare to go out the next spring and make the final run to Utah. It’s in winter quarters 1847 where the first of what Russell Stevenson calls the “twin shocks” of 1847 occurs, which helps us to start to see why church leaders might have started becoming a little more aggressive toward a position of a racial restriction. Now, it involves a fellow by the name of William McCary, who was a black man who had joined the church. He had married a white sister, which was very suspect to a lot of members of the church, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And he was being persecuted by church members there. He was being treated poorly. So he actually approaches the brethren. He approaches Brigham Young, the Quorum of the Twelve, and he asks for their help and their protection from persecution. The minutes of this meeting are really interesting. So this is March of 1847, and he says, “All I ask is will you protect me? I’ve come here and I’ve given myself out to be your servant.” Then Brigham Young makes some interesting and great statements, actually. He says, “Brother, it’s nothing to do with blood, for of one blood has God made all flesh.” And that’s a close paraphrase of Acts 17:26.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Which was, by the way, the one verse that Joseph Smith quoted in his presidential platform about his position on slavery is “God has made of all nations one flesh.” We’re all one blood. So Brigham Young saying, “Actually, that’s not an issue. We don’t care about the race.” In fact, he goes on to say, race isn’t an issue. His own words are, “We have one of the best elders, an African in Lowell, Massachusetts,” referring to Q. Walker Lewis.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And a bit later in the conversation, McCary says, “Well, I want you to intercede for me. I’m not a priest or a leader of the people, but I’m just a common brother because I’m a little shade darker,” to which Brigham Young replied, “We don’t care about the color.” Then McCary looks at the other brother and says, “Do I hear that from all of you?” And they all say, “Aye.” So this is great. As of March of 1847, we cannot yet detect anything remotely resembling priesthood restriction.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
That would’ve been a great chance for Brigham Young to explain, had there been one, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
His statements are all, “No. One of our best elders is an African, Q. Walker Lewis in Massachusetts. We don’t care about color. God has made of all humanity one flesh. We’re all one blood.” And so we see that Brigham Young is actually still, in 1847, reflecting that inclusive spirit exhibited by Joseph Smith.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And so mark 1847 of March as a great moment here, but then it starts to transition just a month or two later. Anything you want to say about that?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Just that this episode is incredibly complex, right? And it demonstrates that as late as 1847, there’s no priesthood policy in the church.

Scott Woodward:
No.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
There’s no thought about implementing anything like that, but William McCary is also the catalyst, it appears—and we’re doing some detective work here with incomplete sources. We don’t have the whole picture—but you can deduce that from some of the things that happen surrounding William McCary is where the first inklings of some sort of exclusion starts to take place in their mind. Because you’ve got Brigham Young right there saying, “Nah. It doesn’t have anything to do with race.”

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But then a few things happen after that cause him to be concerned, and it seems like from here to 1852 is where it starts to develop in his mind and where he’s going to fully explain it in 1852. So go ahead and keep walking us down this path.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. So the next month, April 1847, McCary starts doing weird stuff. Not only has he married a white woman, but he now starts to practice his own little version of plural marriage where he starts marrying a bunch of white women. And the way that they consummate the marriage, his wife is there, and then there’s a consummation, and things are getting weird when the word gets out that William McCarry is polygamous marrying white women. And then he starts to profess that he is, like, some great prophet himself. He said weird stuff, like that he was Father Adam, whose spirit had transmigrated into his body and that he was some great one. Apparently he was a good ventriloquist. He’d throw his voice and try to show that he was some spiritually important man.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
So he’s going to get run out of town. He’s going to get excommunicated. And when some members of the church still show a tendency to want to be with William McCary, or to be part of his version of Mormonism, Parley P. Pratt, he vents his frustration about Latter-day Saints who would, here you go, “want to follow this black man who’s got the blood of Ham in him, which lineage was cursed as regards the priesthood.” There you go. That’s the first recorded statement of a church leader that connects the curse of Ham to a priesthood restriction in the church.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And Parley was just drawing upon the well-worn, centuries-old, Protestant readings of the Ham story, but he’s giving it a little LDS priesthood twist with a paraphrase language of Abraham chapter 1, verse 26. And so he’s resorting to that move. He makes that maneuver as a sort of defensive measure to try to deter church members in Winter Quarters from defecting over to William McCary’s warped version of Mormonism.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And so it’s a defensive move spoken in frustration, but his statement is the first we find on record that hints of some sort of priesthood restriction connected to black Africans.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
So that’s the first. Now, how much does that affect Brigham Young? We’re not sure. It’s never referred to as any kind of precedent for withholding privileges from blacks, but what it does reveal is that, again, some church leaders at this time are harboring some old Protestant beliefs about black Africans descending from Ham’s supposed cursed lineage, and that’s going to start to make inroads in the church.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. Like I said, this episode illustrates where they were at, but also where they’re going to. And Parley P. Pratt and elucidating that, like you said, is using the common thought of the day. It was a common assumption—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—among 19th century Europeans in America, that black people were descendants of Cain. The Bible doesn’t say that. We’ve talked about it.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
It never elucidates what the curse of Cain or Ham is, but they had basically taken the Bible and applied it to their own situation. Definitely went further than what the biblical text was saying.

Scott Woodward:
Definitely. We’re going to see a little less than a year after learning about this debacle, in the minutes of a meeting in Salt Lake City that Brigham Young had begun sharing with other members of the Twelve his view that black Africans were indeed the cursed descendants of Cain. So what Parley P. Pratt says in Winter Quarters is going to become Brigham Young’s go-to justification for a priesthood restriction going forward. So again, what the exact connection was between Parley and Brigham here, we don’t know, but we know the same sort of thinking starts to prevail in the leadership circles of the church. All right. Now, the second of the twin shocks of 1847 actually deals with Q. Walker Lewis. That priesthood man, who Brigham Young said was one of our best elders.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Q. Walker Lewis and his son Enoch Lewis live at that time in Massachusetts. And an elder named William Applebee was on assignment to visit Eastern Church branches, and he visited the Massachusetts branch, and he was scandalized, first by the fact that he found a black man who’d been ordained to the priesthood. Apparently he wasn’t aware of Q. Walker Lewis.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
But more troubling still to Applebee was the fact that Lewis’s son Enoch was married to a white woman named Mary Webster and that they had a baby. And Applebee, he writes a letter expressing his concerns to Brigham Young, and the two later are going to meet in person at Winter Quarters on December 3, 1847 with a majority of the Twelve there. That meeting’s going to last over five hours, but all we have from that meeting are thirteen lines of notes. That’s it.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. And those lines mostly express their concern over interracial marriage.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. They’re disgusted by it.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. Which, like we said, they’re concerned over racial amalgamation.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Which, again, is a common theme throughout the 19th century of, “Hey, the races can be equal, but they can’t mix.”

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Even a progressive person, for the most part, would say that.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. This is where we’re going to get our first recorded instance of Brigham Young’s hyperbolic expression that capital punishment should be the penalty for interracial marriage and mixing and having mixed-race offspring. It’s where we have recorded his belief that the offspring of mixed race marriages would be sterile, as many believed in his day, as we’ve talked about.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And these kind of statements are good examples of what Elder Quentin L. Cook was talking about when he spoke at BYU. He said, “Brigham Young said things about race that fall short of our standards today. Some of his beliefs and words reflected the culture of his time.” Totally, right? Brigham Young’s clearly not drawing from any revelations from the Lord on these views, but from the cultural beliefs of his time, the chief of which being the fear of race mixing. And to be clear, it’s this fear of race mixing that seems to be at the heart of Brigham Young’s concerns about black equality in the church.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And from the fragmentary historical record we have, it seems to begin developing at least by 1847, when he found out first that William McCary was marrying white women in the church and then defiantly began his own brand of Mormonism after his excommunication. That’s shock number one. And then later that year when he found out that Enoch Lewis had married a white woman and that they had a child together, that’s shock number two. So interracial marriage was beginning to make inroads in the church, and that made a lot of members nervous, including Brigham Young, as we know from his own strong statements on the topic. Where would it stop, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So this fear of race mixing seems to account for what’s ultimately underlying Brigham Young’s reversal from 1847 when he said, “We don’t care about the color, and one of our best elders is an African,” to 1852, when he said, essentially, “We do care about the color, and no Africans have a right to be an elder in this church.” So anything else you want to say about that?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Just Elder Cook’s statement that you quoted there, I want to go back to that for just a second.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
See, part of the struggles I’ve had with this is that question over prophetic infallibility.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Where I don’t want to get ahead of the leaders of the church in saying these views were incorrect, or church leaders were in error.

Scott Woodward:
Sure.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But Elder Cook basically said that.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
“Brigham Young said some things about race that fall short of our standards today.” I also think Elder Cook was thoughtful enough to add in the second statement, which is just as important to say, “Some of his beliefs and words reflected the culture of his time.” Yeah. That’s a—functionally a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, and then you’ve got the Gospel Topics essay on Race and the Priesthood. And even going back to the 1960s, where the first presidency issues a statement, saying, “Stop giving explanations for the priesthood policy. We don’t know.” Are all leaders of the church saying they were in error?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So if we’re trying to say, “Hey, for prophetic infallibility, do we have other prophets saying that they were incorrect?” Yeah, we do. And that’s OK. They’re trying to lead us with charity to say they reflect the world that they lived in.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And they made mistakes, when it comes down to it. Like I said, this was a—go back and review some of the outside literature from sources outside the church. Racial amalgamation was a huge fear in the 1840s and ’50s that had all kinds of weird iterations that came out that today we know aren’t accurate.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But at the time were not only seen as the spiritual consensus of the day, I mean, biblical interpretation, but also the scientific consensus of the day, so they made a mistake.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But like Elder Cook said, their actions reflect the environment that they lived in.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. And it’s just to think about how patient and merciful God is to allow for that kind of thing to happen with leaders of the church as well as the rest of us, like he’s going to let this work itself out.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And it does work itself out, though it takes maybe, again, a lot longer than some people like me, who are very impatient, would’ve preferred. But God has the long game in view, and it’s all going to work out.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But this is going to take us, again, more than a century to get there. But yeah. Great perspective.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So again, this is all detective work, trying to piece together things that happened in 1847 that are going to lead to 1852 when Brigham Young first publicly announces the policy, but there’s actually some nuance and complexity surrounding how the policy was announced. For instance, I was surprised to see that it wasn’t announced in an official church epistle or even in a general conference.

Scott Woodward:
Where was it announced?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
A legislative session, which is weird, right? We wouldn’t expect church practice to be determined in a session of the Utah legislature.

Scott Woodward:
Right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But at this time, Brigham Young’s wearing a couple hats. He is the president of the church. He is the governor of the Utah Territory. He is the superintendent of Indian Affairs. And it’s in a discussion about political policy that this statement comes out. So this is maybe a big piece of evidence in when we’re saying, “Hey, to even call it a policy at this point in time might be stretching it.”

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
It doesn’t seem like there was a ton of forethought or reflection on what the long-term implications would be. And also the record shows that there wasn’t total consensus, either.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So give us a little bit of background there.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. OK. So we’re January 1852, and as you said, this is in a Utah territorial legislative meeting—

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
—where Brigham Young as governor and several apostles as the legislative body, they were debating the passing of a bill that would essentially legalize a form of African slavery in the recently created Utah territory, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And this is a territory which had been neutral on the issue of slavery up to this point, although there were already at least 40 slaves living in the territory. So slavery already existed here, but it was by custom, not by law. Some members of the church from the South had brought their slaves with them, and that’s how that happened. So it’s during the first of these legislative sessions, January 23, where Governor-president Young makes his position clear, showing that his politics were fully intertwined with his theology. They’re not really differentiating during these legislative sessions at all.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
So Governor Young argues for slavery, and it’s a benevolent form of slavery, where the masters are benevolent to their servants, but he makes a two-step move to make his argument for slavery in the Utah territory. He says, number one, that God cursed Cain. So he’s going to use a biblical argument here: God cursed Cain, saying that his descendants would not receive priesthood until the last of Abel’s descendants received it. Consequently, he says, this is move two, “I am firm in the belief that Cain’s seed ought to dwell in servitude.” It’s a little bit of a convoluted argument, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Let’s think about it for a second. Because the Bible says that Cain is cursed, and then Brigham Young adds “as pertaining to the priesthood,” consequently, “I’m firm that Cain’s seed should dwell in servitude.” It’s really interesting thin argument that is also not scripturally awesome. As we’ve talked about, the Cain argument—

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
—it’s built on the faulty assumptions, again, that one, black Africans are the descendants of Cain; that the curse of Cain had to do with restricting priesthood, number two; and that this curse was somehow passed down to all of Cain’s descendants in the modern age. So it’s quite problematic on many levels. And then, as you said, not all the legislative body agreed, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Orson Pratt vehemently disagrees with Brigham Young. So a few days later on January 27, we have the minutes of that meeting, and Orson Pratt passionately expresses the fact that they, the apostles, have received no commandment from God to inflict any curse upon black Africans. He’s arguing specifically about slavery, not a priesthood ban, but his arguments are applicable to both.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And then a week later on February 4 Orson gives another impassioned speech, to which the next day Brigham Young gives a response speech, where he doubles down on his curse of Cain reasoning. And he says that even if no prophet or apostle has ever declared blacks to be the children of Cain before, he says, “I’ll declare it.” So you can tell that Orson Pratt was pushing back on that assumption, right? “How do we even know?” In fact, I have a quote from Orson here. It’s not from the legislative meetings, but from 1856, so this would be four years later, he says, “We have no proof that the Africans are the descendants of old Cain who was cursed. And even if we had that evidence, we have not been ordered to inflict that curse upon that race,” he says.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And so I imagine on February 4, Orson Pratt saying something like that, because we get Brigham Young’s response the next day, saying, “If there never was a prophet,” I’m quoting directly now, “If there never was a prophet or apostle of Jesus Christ spoke it before, I tell you this people that are commonly called negroes are the children of old Cain. I know they are, and I know they cannot bear rule in the priesthood,” he says, “for the curse on them was to remain upon them until the residue of the posterity of Michael and his wife receive the blessings.” This will be a common argument that he will make over the next few years.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, and can I just point out that this would be really weird to a 21st-century Latter-day Saint?

Scott Woodward:
Totally.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And it illustrates, this isn’t as cut and dry as we think it is.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
It just shows that there wasn’t total uniformity. They were having a debate, going back and forth. And so there needs to be caution in quoting a statement from this and saying, “That’s what the doctrine is,” right?

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Because it’s clear that they’re discussing back and forth, and there’s not unanimity, and Orson Pratt is basically saying, “God hasn’t commanded us to do this,” which seems to indicate that there’s no kind of revelatory command—

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—to put this in place.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
They’re creating policy. We’re getting to see how the sausage is made, basically, and it’s messy.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And therefore we need to be cautious when we take statements like the ones from this meeting and just say, “That proves what the Latter-day Saints believed at the time.”

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
There’s complexity. There’s views. There’s back-and-forth on each one of these things. And to be honest with you, to me it’s kind of encouraging to see that Brigham Young wasn’t absolutely, 100 percent, “this is my word and you’re going to do it.” He was allowing the discussion to go back and forth. He’s rebutting. People are rebutting him. It’s not a set in stone, “this is the way it is because God told me it’s this way,” kind of thing.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. That’s interesting. He never claims in this meeting or anywhere else, actually, that God inspired him to institute some sort of a priesthood restriction, and so I think we should be careful not to claim what Brigham Young himself did not claim.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
He never says that.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
He never says, “This is the word of the Lord. This is what the Lord told me to do.” In fact, in that same meeting, let me just quote one more quote. He says this in response to Orson Pratt, “I may vary in my views.” Interesting. “I may vary in my views from others, and they may think that I’m foolish in the things that I have spoken,” read: Orson Pratt, “and they might think that they know more than I do,” but then he says, “but I know more than they do.” So we see this back and forth between especially Brigham Young and Orson Pratt here. But I find it, again, encouraging that he’s acknowledging that he’s giving his views. Right? He’s not saying, “I’m giving the word of the Lord here.”

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
He’s saying, “Here’s my views on the topic. I believe that black Africans are descendants of Cain who shouldn’t hold priesthood, and therefore that servitude in Utah territory is OK and justified,” right? As much as we might disagree with everything about that statement, and what’s important to highlight is that he’s saying, “That’s my view. And I know people disagree with my view, and that’s OK, but I’m right and they’re wrong,” he says. And so I think all of this speaks to the question that naturally comes up in one way or another from students and friends and family members who wrestle with this issue. And the question is essentially, “Was Brigham Young inspired by God to institute the priesthood ban, or is this an example of an uninspired error?”

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
In fact, one of my teenage nephews called me the other day and he said, “Uncle Scott, I’ve got this kid at my high school who’s black, and he says that my church is lame because we’re racist, and when I asked him what he means by that, he said, ‘Well, you guys didn’t ordain black members to your priesthood.’” And my nephew was pretty struck by that. And so he was calling to see if there was any truth in this statement. And this is always a hard question to answer quickly, right? Like, what’s the five-minute version of what you and I have been talking about for hours in our last few episodes?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. What’s the five-minute version of this discussion?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. So before I even tried launching into an answer, I said, “How about this? How about you and your parents read together the church’s essay on race and priesthood, and then let’s get back together and talk about it? How’s that sound?” And he said, “OK, but before we hang up, I just need you to answer one thing.” I said, “OK, what’s that?” He said, “My biggest question is, ‘Did God tell Brigham Young to ban blacks from the priesthood?’ I really just need to know if it was God who did it.” Ooh. See, that’s at the heart of it for a lot of people, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And that’s a really important question we need to think very carefully about, and as you and I have examined the evidence, Casey, I think it’s safe to say that our answer to that question is no. In the details of the historical record, we can find no evidence that God inspired the priesthood ban.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
In fact, we find evidence to the contrary.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And let me review this evidence concisely here, just to be crystal clear, I think there’s about five points we want to make here.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
First, Brigham Young never claimed that God inspired him to institute the ban. So again, we probably want to avoid claiming a certain status for Brigham Young’s words on this issue, which he didn’t claim for himself.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Second, Brigham Young acknowledged he was only giving his views on the subject, and he recognized that no other apostle or prophet had ever taught such a thing about blacks as he was then claiming. And having reviewed Joseph Smith’s views on blacks in our last episode, I think we can affirm that Brigham is right, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Joseph had never taught such things. Third, Brigham Young only ever gave one theological rationale for the priesthood ban, namely the Cain-Ham rationale, which was the well-worn Protestant justification for slavery, but with his own priesthood ban spin on it. And we know that this rationale has been firmly disavowed by the leadership of our church today.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Fourth, his fellow apostle Orson Pratt adamantly opposed Brigham Young’s proposal for black African slavery in the Utah territory because, he said, church leaders couldn’t presumptively impose a curse upon black Africans “without the voice of the Lord speaking to us” and “without receiving any authority from heaven to do so.” So here we have at least one apostle on record outright saying that the Lord had given the apostles of that day no revelation on imposing the curse of slavery. And what was true of slavery in that context was certainly true of priesthood ordination. I believe that same logic holds.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And fifth, Brigham Young adopted erroneous views about race mixing from supposed experts of his day, showing that he was clearly influenced by his culture on racial issues, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Elder Quentin L․ Cook acknowledged this in that quote we shared earlier about how some of Brigham Young’s “beliefs and words reflected the culture of his time” and “fall short of our standards today.” That’s Elder Cook. And we see clear evidence of this in his rhetoric as he publicly articulates this ban in these legislative sessions of 1852.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
He said at that February 5 meeting, for instance, that if church leaders ever authorized intermarriage between blacks and whites and allowed blacks to partake with whites in “all the blessings God has given to us,” then, he said, on that very day and hour, the priesthood would be taken from this church, and God would leave us to our fate, and the church would go to destruction.” Wow. Well, of course that never happened post 1978, but we see that his words reflect the fear-based “science” of the culture of his day, which it’s clear that Brigham Young believed and then gave them an LDS twist.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And we might add, as a bonus, a sixth reason, which is Elder Bruce R․ McConkie’s disavowal in 1978, just after the correcting revelation had been received, where he said, “Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or whomsoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation.” And then he boldly but humbly acknowledged, “We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that has now come into the world.” So there you go. Those are at least six evidences that lead us to conclude that God was not behind the priesthood ban.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
But rather that it grew instead out of Brigham Young’s sincere beliefs embedded in the cultural context of his day about Cain and the dangers of race mixing, et cetera.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. And it’s common for members of the church to sometimes make the assumption that God directs everything that happens in the church.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
That’s clearly not the case in the ancient or the modern church, that God gives directives and guidance, but then the leaders of the church are often left to fill in the blanks.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
For instance, a parallel is in the book of Acts. Peter doesn’t know if they’re supposed to take the gospel to the Gentiles.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
He has a dream that indicates to him he should. But then the question comes up of “Do the Gentiles have to submit to all Jewish ceremonies, like circumcision?” And in that case, there’s no place in the book of Acts where it says, “and God spoke to Peter and gave him the answer.” Instead, in Acts 15, it talks about them bringing all the apostles to Jerusalem. They all sit down. They have a discussion. They come to the conclusion, “No, it’s not necessary.” But boy, if we had the minutes of that meeting in Jerusalem, would it have been as lockstep as we assume it was?

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Would there have been voices for or against? Paul hints that he and Peter still have arguments about it later on, years later.

Scott Woodward:
Totally.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And that it’s not all set in stone. And there’s also places in the scriptures where an apostle or a prophet will just flat out say, “I don’t have a revelation concerning this.” I can think of one instance in the writings of Paul where he essentially says, ”I don’t have any revelation on this, but here’s what I think.

Scott Woodward:
1 Corinthians 7, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
1 Corinthians 7. That’s exactly right.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Where he says, “I don’t have any revelation from God, but here’s what I think.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And that happens a lot, actually, where the Lord, for whatever reason, chooses to speak or not speak on specific subjects, but most of the time allows prophets and apostles to make their way forward and then tries to gently correct them.

Scott Woodward:
Mm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And again, they’re creatures of the environment that they live in. I had a kid in one of my classes say, “Was Brigham Young racist?” I said, “By our standards today, these things are very racially insensitive.”

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Was it racially insensitive when John asked Jesus to call down fire from heaven and kill a village full of Samaritans?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Samaritans were half-breeds. That was a very racist statement, right? So—

Scott Woodward:
Totally.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Imperfect people are all God ever had to work with, and we’ve got to recognize that Brigham Young isn’t claiming to receive a revelation here. He’s saying, “Based on my view, this is what I think is best.”

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And the leaders of the church subsequently have disavowed the line of reasoning he used.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But that’s part of the complexity and understanding how prophets and apostles work with God.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. And errors are to be expected, right. If God’s calling fallible humans to be his servants, then you can almost count on some fumbles along the way, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
In fact, Brigham Young himself affirmed this only six years later when he said, “Can a prophet or an apostle be mistaken? Do not ask me any such question,” he said, “for I will acknowledge that all the time. But,” now, listen to this: “But I do not acknowledge that I designedly lead this people astray one hair’s breath from the truth. And I do not knowingly do a wrong, though I may commit many wrongs.” So did Brigham Young ever intentionally try to mess things up? Did he ever purposefully try to go against God’s will? Sounds like absolutely not. But did Brigham Young think that Brigham Young could make mistakes? Absolutely. And articulating this priesthood ban by pulling in these cultural threads of the curse of Cain doctrine and this fear of race mixing is just a really clear example of that in action.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So to finish the story and give you the aftermath of those 1852 legislative meetings, Brigham Young won the debate, and Utah becomes a slave territory for the next 10 years, until in 1862 the U. S. Congress passes a law freeing slaves in all U. S. territories. And so that was a pretty short-lived law in Utah. However, while slavery in Utah only lasts 10 years, the discriminatory theology articulated in those 1852 debates eventually becomes so entrenched in the church that it’s going to take a revelation from God to overturn it 126 years later.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And so the question we want to talk about next time is “Why does it take so long for this to be corrected?” Why does it remain in place for another hundred years after Brigham Young’s presidency? Why doesn’t one of his successors just correct that mistake earlier? So it’s a complex question. It’s an important question, and we want to get into it next time.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. And let me just end by saying this: I still think Brigham Young’s a prophet.

Scott Woodward:
Totally.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And I still think all the people that led the church back then were inspired. I don’t have to agree with everything that they said to believe that they’re inspired, and I can still feel love for them, in spite of the weaknesses that they have. In fact, I’m grateful that they had the courage to address these issues and talk about them, even if they may have ended up in an incorrect place. And it’s OK. Like I said, this is, like we brought up at the first of the episode, a real test of, “Do we really believe in infallibility or not?” We’ve never claimed prophets are perfect.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
The scriptures clearly don’t depict them as perfect, but we do believe in an overall providence that where God is leading us out of the kind of bad environments and misguided beliefs that we have to a better place, but it takes a long time to do that, and a bigger timeframe than maybe we can see as mortals here on Earth.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. I am with you, Casey Griffiths. I firmly believe that Brigham Young was a true prophet of God and the rightful successor to Joseph Smith. I believe he held the keys of the kingdom. He was a true apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ. And at the same time, I also firmly believe that Brigham Young made an uninspired mistake in excluding blacks from the priesthood, which had repercussions for over a hundred years and affected a lot of lives.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And I hold both of these beliefs together at the same time. And I guess that would be my hope, that we could hold both of these truths together in tension at the same time: that prophets of God are fallible and that God works through them in spite of their flaws to bring about His marvelous work.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And this is all couched in the understanding the Lord began the Doctrine and Covenants with, in Doctrine and Covenants 1, right, where he calls his servants weak and simple and error-prone and sinful, and yet says that through them he’s going to prepare the world for the Second Coming. And then you just skip section 2 over to section 3, and you’ve got your first very clear example of a weak and simple and error-prone prophet who sinned in caving to peer pressure from Martin Harris to get the 116 pages, the book of Lehi, lost. Right? Like, that’s a big gaff.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
That was a huge error. That was a mistake that Joseph Smith made, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But remember what the Lord said at the very beginning of his revelation to Joseph Smith about this: Doctrine and Covenants 3:1, he said, “The works and the designs and the purposes of God cannot be frustrated, neither can they come to naught.” So Joseph Smith cannot frustrate the purposes of God. He cannot cause them to come to naught. The same is true of Brigham Young or anyone else.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
The designs and purposes of God cannot be frustrated by humans. They can make errors. Those errors can have real-world consequences in the lives of real people, but ultimately those will not frustrate the purposes of God. And I believe that’s absolutely true, both of Joseph Smith and the loss of the 116 pages and of Brigham Young and the problematic theology he introduced in 1852 at those legislative meetings. Both of those have real-world consequences, but neither of them can ultimately frustrate the designs and purposes of God. The Lord will intervene and ultimately will set this right, but it’s just going to take some time.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And so next time we’ll dive into the timeline of all this. Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters. Join us next time as we dig into the details of how and when this racial restriction gradually became fully entrenched policy in the church through the perpetuation of two major false doctrines and some false memories. Today’s episode was produced by Scott Woodward and edited by Nick Galieti and Scott Woodward, with show notes and transcript by Gabe Davis. Church History Matters is a podcast of Scripture Central, a nonprofit which exists to help build enduring faith in Jesus Christ by making Latter-day Saint scripture and church history accessible, comprehensible, and defensible to people everywhere. For more resources to enhance your gospel study, go to scripturecentral.org, where everything is available for free because of the generous donations of people like you. Thank you so much for being a part of this with us.